Happy New Year Friends and Colleagues. I hope that your holidays were filled with peace, joy, and rest. I also hope that you were able to refill yourselves, and are ready for new and renewed fun and challenges. I am contacting you today as the Director of our HHMI grant, to share with you the resulting capstone reports from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) grant-possessing institutions – of which Kalamazoo College has been one. We were awarded the grant in 2018, and the work has been supported by HHMI until 2023 (this marked our 5th year of funding – we are now in a 2 years extension on the work – so, our work will continue). Below is a message from the team at HHMI, with a link where you can read all 57 capstone reports (Kalamazoo College’s report can be found on pages 49-51). We (our K-HHMI team) will have more to come…

“In 2017 and 2018, a diverse community of 57 colleges and universities embarked on a five-year journey, each funded by $1 million grants from HHMI, to build strong support systems for encouraging student participation in science. In a paradigm shift for both the funder and the grantees, each institution made a commitment to change their mindset from “fixing students” to changing their institutional policies, practices, and cultures so that students of all backgrounds would be able to succeed in science.

“We invite you to read the capstone report, 57 Journeys | 57 Stories, which highlights what the IE 1 & 2 schools have learned and accomplished, and what challenges remain.”

Regina Stevens-Truss, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, HHMI Grant Director